The present invention concerns a timepiece with touch-type reading and control of time data. The invention more particularly concerns a wristwatch enabling a user paying average attention, in conditions in which he does not want to or cannot look at the dial, without any acoustic signal perceptible to the persons near him, to find out the current time or be informed of an alarm time that can also be chosen, activated or deactivated without any visual check. This is the case, for example, of a user in conditions of reduced visibility, for example at nightfall, or a user with a visual handicap, or even a blind user.
The principle of such a wristwatch, whose external appearance in no way differs from other wristwatches in which the time can be read solely visually, is already known for example from U.S. Pat. No. 5,559,761. According to this principle, capacitive, inductive or other sensors are arranged on the periphery of the glass and each sensor is individually activated by the presence of a finger triggering a vibrating device, which delivers trains of non-acoustic vibrations representative of time data or an operating mode. The vibrating device used is for example that described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,365,497. In practice, after a certain number of more or less complex manipulations on the push-buttons or crown, by short or long applications of pressure, pulling or successively combining several operations, the user follows the periphery of the glass with his finger or positions it on a single sensor until vibrations can be felt on his finger or his wrist. In order to determine the detected or selected position, he has to return his finger to the bezel, which includes as many raised or sunk markings as sensors, then count the number of positions separating it from the crown forming the basic reference. In order to facilitate determination of a position, U.S. Pat. No. 6,052,339 proposes having markings for all the sensors, carried by the bezel extending beyond the latter such that the user can also follow the edge of the middle part with his finger.
Despite these improvements, wristwatches corresponding to the aforecited prior art still have debatable aesthetic appearance, and, especially, require non-negligible learning in order to “read” the time or control a time function. According to the description of U.S. Pat. No. 6,052,339, in order to change the alarm time, a short application of pressure has to be made on the crown, the sensor at 6 o'clock has to be briefly touched, the crown has to be pulled before finally being able to select a new alarm time.
It is thus an object of the present invention to make the manipulations that have to be carried out to read or control time data in a touch-type manner much more simple, and especially to make these manipulations very easy to memorise for a user with an average attention span.